What I'm reading about Portugal now

If you can't go ... read.

“What’s one book you’ve read that has changed your life?” the woman interviewing me on Zoom asked. If the interview went well, I was hoping I would land a business contract.

My brain hit pause.

Oh my god, you cannot be blanking on this question, I thought. You cannot. You have a degree in English literature. You love books. You’ve read thousands of books. Come up with something!

And yet, there it was. A blank mind in front of me. Nothing.

“Uh,” I said, stalling for time, looking behind me at my bookshelf, wondering if any of the current ones on there could qualify as being “life-changing.”

Seeing none, I went with a favorite business book, Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini. A-ha! I thought. Perfect.

“No, what’s one book outside of business that has changed your life,” she asked again, not letting me deflect.

I wanted to say the obvious, that every book you read, every show you watch, everything that influences you changes your life in some way. It’s all life-changing.

A Reading Life

In elementary school I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby series, and C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, and anything by Judy Blume and Madeleine L’Engle that opened up my imagination to new places and brought me epic female heroines.

In high school I read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina out of the school library, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, both of which I found on my own, and I remember their discoveries.

I was a fan of Saul Bellow, Henry James, Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor when I was being an intellectual in college. Later, in a cabin I rented in the woods, I scared myself silly reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and felt liberated sexually by D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lovers.

I read Out of Africa and West with the Night and The Liars’ Club and other memoirs by brave women in my thirties and forties. I discovered A Prayer for Owen Meany and Shantaram and The Count of Monte Cristo and Elana Ferrante’s incredible fiction about two Italian friends (the HBO Series My Brilliant Friend is based on her books).

A friend (and a subscriber to this newsletter) recommended that author David Sedaris and I laughed so hysterically at everything he wrote, that eventually it was his name that I mentioned to my interviewer, a woman with a degree in mathematics and an engineer’s mind who looked at me as if that was the lamest response she had ever heard.

“He’s funny?” I said.

I didn’t get the contract, and I’m glad. Something better showed up. Besides, after Covid, the question, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” just seems ridiculous.

“Who knows?” seems the most appropriate answer. “Do you?”

Reading about Portugal

One thing Covid taught me is how much it helps me when I use my imagination to travel to places I can’t reach physically. Books got me through that feeling of being stuck, trapped in my home and my life and my body and transported me into a new place.

I first read about surfing off the coast of Portugal in the book Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. I followed a woman on a camel with her dog winding her way across the Australian desert solo in the book Tracks by Robyn Davidson. I read the rich prose of Pico Iyer’s Asian adventures in Video Night in Kathmandu.

I owe a huge thanks to

Marko Ayling

who writes

The Missive

on Substack for the travel book recommendations he made on his former YouTube channel. I read most of the books he recommended and they helped me go to many new places.

That’s what I’m leaning on now that our plans to move to Portugal this year didn’t come to fruition. Despite all of our best efforts, our house didn’t sell, and we missed a window to move this fall (I say “a” window because there will be other windows - we haven’t given up).

One thing I’ve learned from studying mountain climbers is that fatal errors happen when you don’t turn around and go back down the mountain in the right weather window.

Many climbers have missed their Mount Everest summit because of a storm or an accident or an illness and have had to try again to make it to the top. Some seven times. Or ten times. Or more. It’s the ones that refuse to let go when a storm comes in who lose the chance to try again.

So I’m using this period to prepare for our next try, and I’m gathering books about Portugal around me to help me stay the course.

Right now I’m reading The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (the author of Life of Pi) and since I can’t help but read two books at once I’m also reading Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier (there’s also a film of the same name).

Both are fictional books of romantic quests within and around Portugal. On a visual level, I’m going to rewatch 100 Foot Wave, the HBO Television Series about American surfer Garrett McNamara’s quest to ride a 100 foot wave off the coast of Nazare, Portugal.

On deck is James Clavell’s Shogun whose hero wants to break the Portuguese monopoly on Japanese trade, and books by José Saramago, a controversial Portuguese writer who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1998.

I plan to start learning how to speak Portuguese soon to be able to read Portuguese authors in their native language.

Of one thing I’m sure, that’ll all change my life.

P.S. Got a book recommendation for me? Please leave it in the comments. I’d love to hear it. As a gift in return, here’s a Montana sunset.

Montana winter sunset